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This paper discusses the challenges that two doctoral researchers faced while researching religious minorities and women in a culturally sensitive society such as Pakistan. Their shared interest in sensitive topics related to gender and minorities in Pakistan led both researchers to collaborate in this study to provide a better understanding of issues in qualitative research in the same research context. They discuss the challenges of interviewing participants within the educational context. They also suggest some ways to overcome such challenges.

Based on Foucualt's writings on regimes of truth, discourse and systems of exclusion, the authors in this study analyze how patriarchal and faith-based regimes of truth constrain some discourses that affect participants’ willingness and insights to reflect on the issues freely.

While reflecting on their experiences in data collection, authors report that qualitative researchers struggle to access participants to investigate issues related to gender subjectivities and minority faiths in educational contexts in developing societies like Pakistan. Researchers face a variety of problems, from their own positionality to participants’ access to their responses. The reason for this is patriarchal and religious regimes and also their intersecting relations that restrict participants’ ability to reflect on their issues. Minorities in Pakistan are often prevented from expressing their views freely by blasphemy fears. The discourses of gender are also sensitive. Therefore, the study suggests that in societies such as Pakistan, where religion and gender are emotive terms, the problem can be handled by counter-discourses that challenge truth regimes by conceiving research as a transformative practice. Moreover, such societies require a policy for protecting researchers and participants in the interest of knowledge production and dissemination.

This study is originally based on the primary data used in two doctoral studies.

The purpose of this research is to examine the factors that affect brand satisfaction of a Muslim customer who is making purchases from selling outlets on social media.

The study used a new mechanism of sampling for research studies relating to social media which. Further, we used hierarchical regression to analyze the moderation effects of religiosity.

The authors’ findings suggest that religiosity has moderation effects on the relationship between halal social media and brand satisfaction of a Muslim customer and even higher moderation effects on relationship between customer engagement and brand satisfaction of a Muslim customer.

The respondents of this research are completely unknown as the data has been collected from google-docs link sharing arrangement.

This study identifies factors that need to be focused on winning the brand loyalty of a Muslim customer.

This study provides a new sampling methodology to be used for the purpose of studies related to social media, which has been labeled as “social-media disguised snow ball sampling”. Further, this study is one of the few studies in the area of “halal social media”.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of gender in the relationships between employee’s work experience and their chances of obtaining a job promotion.

Five hundred middle to lower management Pakistan employees from service industries were surveyed. Measures used to obtain data included work experience, job promotions and gender. Gender was dummy coded. Moderation analyses via SPSS was used to investigate the moderating effect of gender in the relationship between employee’s work experience and job promotions.

The results indicated that work experience was positively associated with job promotion. However, the results indicated that gender fully moderated the relationship between work experience and job promotion. Specifically, female employees were less likely to get promoted compared to male employees despite having similar work experiences.

Drawing together the human capital theory, social role theory and cultural factors, this study highlighted the socioeconomic/cultural barriers’ impact on Pakistani women’s career ascendance.

There is a lack of empirical evidence about career ascendance among Pakistani women. Therefore, the aim of the present study is to conduct and provide empirical evidence so that relevant agencies within Pakistan can develop more gender-equitable promotional policies and processes.

This study responded to the call for more empirical investigation of career ascendancy among women in developing countries. While this issue has been discussed in many developed western countries, there is a lack of empirical evidence in Muslim Pakistan.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the heat transportation rate by using Cattaneo–Christov heat flux model. Furthermore, homogeneous-heterogeneous reaction is also deliberated in the modeling of concentration expression.

The nonlinear PDEs are reduced to ODEs via implementation of applicable transformations. Numerical scheme bvp4c is used to obtain convergent solutions.

The main findings are to characterize the generalized Fourier’s heat flux and homogeneous-heterogeneous reactions in 3D flow of non-Newtonian cross fluid.

It is to certify that this paper is neither published earlier nor submitted elsewhere.

Lean and agile strategies are two basic supply chain paradigms that strategist decouples based on their internal and external environment. This study aims to identify the influence of market orientation (MO) and quality management (QM) deployment on the supply chain strategies. Furthermore, this study also seeks empirical evidence of the impact of these core strategies on creating risk management capabilities.

Quantitative research technique is deployed to explain the phenomenon. The data was gathered through a structured scale questionnaire from supply chain professionals working at different manufacturing firms. Valid data of 134 respondents is then analyzed through partial least squares structural equation modeling for further empirical understanding.

The outcome of the research indicates that MO capability; as an external drive is a key to make an operational strategy. QM as an internal control is more prone to formulating a lean strategy (LS). Another important finding is that LS does not complement risk management capabilities especially in an uncertain market condition.

The study suggested concrete implications for risk management through the right mix of lean and agile supply chain strategies. There are some good insights for the supply chain policy-makers working in a developing country.

This study will provide empirical evidence for managing supply chain risk through an effective strategy making.

This paper aims to address the flow of Sisko nanofluid by an unsteady curved surface. Non-uniform heat source/sink is considered for heat transfer analysis.

Numerical solutions are constructed using bvp4c procedure.

Pressure profile inside boundary region is increased when A and K are enhanced.

No such analysis is yet presented.

This study aims to examine the effects of climate change and agricultural technologies on crop production in Vietnam for the period 1990–2018.

Several econometric techniques – such as the augmented Dickey–Fuller, Phillips–Perron, the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) bounds test, variance decomposition method (VDM) and impulse response function (IRF) are used for the empirical analysis.

The results of the ARDL bounds test confirm the significant dynamic relationship among the variables under consideration, with a significance level of 1%. The primary findings indicate that the average annual temperature exerts a negative influence on crop yield, both in the short term and in the long term. The utilization of fertilizer has been found to augment crop productivity, whereas the application of pesticides has demonstrated the potential to raise crop production in the short term. Moreover, both the expansion of cultivated land and the utilization of energy resources have played significant roles in enhancing agricultural output across both in the short term and in the long term. Furthermore, the robustness outcomes also validate the statistical importance of the factors examined in the context of Vietnam.

This study provides persuasive evidence for policymakers to emphasize advancements in intensive agriculture as a means to mitigate the impacts of climate change. In the research, the authors use average annual temperature as a surrogate measure for climate change, while using fertilizer and pesticide usage as surrogate indicators for agricultural technologies. Future research can concentrate on the impact of ICT, climate change (specifically pertaining to maximum temperature, minimum temperature and precipitation), and agricultural technological improvements that have an impact on cereal production.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to examine how climate change and technology effect crop output in Vietnam from 1990 to 2018. Various econometrics tools, such as ARDL modeling, VDM and IRF, are used for estimation.

This paper aims to examine the impact of corruption on bank stability and bank profitability separately for Islamic banks as well as conventional banks. Moreover, it also investigates whether the existence of Islamicity and corruption in the environment can moderate the Islamic banks-stability and Islamic banks-profitability relationships.

Sample of the study consists 136 banks comprising 70 Islamic and 66 conventional banks over the period 2015–2021 from nine countries with dual banking systems. Panel data fixed effect estimator with year effects is used to estimate the results.

Results of the study show that Islamicity is positively and corruption is negatively related to bank stability as well as bank profitability. Further, it is found that the effect of corruption is significantly different between Islamic and conventional banks, wherein conventional banks are more adversely affected than Islamic banks. However, an insignificant difference between Islamic and conventional banks is observed in the case of Islamicity.

The study provides theoretical and practical implications. On theoretical side, the study presents Islamicity as more reliable measure of religiosity based on Islamic values that can help in control of corruption by moderating corruption-bank stability nexus especially in dual banking economies which have high share of Muslim population. On practical side, the study recommends policy and operational measures for mitigating corruption aiming bank stability.

The results of this study contribute to the corruption-finance, religion-finance and dual banking literature. This study suggests that regulators and bank management must consider corruption and Islamicity while formulating their policies for better bank performance/stability.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the legal framework and challenges to economic, social and cultural (ESC) rights of women.

This paper focuses on ESC rights of women. ESC rights are recognized under primary instrument International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), which is adopted by the United Nations (UN) in 1966. States have obligations to respect, protect and fulfil ESC rights. This paper aims to address ESC rights of women in particular. It analyzes the international legal framework including provisions of UN Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and ICESCR and its optional protocol. It also analyzes provisions of Women’s Convention and identifies its linkage to ICESCR.

ESC rights are not justiciable and growing debate over justiciability is important for consideration. Also, there exist certain challenges for the progressive realization of ESC rights which need to be addressed by analyzing provisions of the existing legal framework and Maastricht Guidelines. The argument developed throughout the paper is that women’s ESC rights may be protected at all levels by the progressive realization of these rights. The issue of justiciability may also be resolved to protect the basic needs and interests of women that leads to their empowerment.

The work is original and not published by any other journal so far.

Lean manufacturing is one of the leading paradigms for fast and proficient manufacturing but its proper implementation is a foremost task due to certain barriers affecting lean and can be handled when utilized with RFID technology. With this aspect in view, the purpose of this paper is to enlighten and present a thorough literature study that can show how RFID-based lean manufacturing is helpful for handling barriers affecting lean manufacturing in light of previous literature available.

In order to achieve this purpose a systematic literature review is conducted to justify the impacts of RFID technology for handling barriers. The aim of this systematic literature review is to initially find the barriers affecting lean implementation and then to explain the properties of RFID-based lean manufacturing which are highly feasible to handle detected barriers.

An interrelation is generated in this study which provides a clear indication that the properties of RFID carry significant effects to handle detected barriers in the operational, managerial and financial regime of manufacturing companies. The detected barriers that affect lean implementation are company’s cultures, top management commitment, poor employee administration, lack of finances, unbalanced inventory control, unstable customer handling and longer lead times. The properties of RFID-based lean manufacturing like operational visibility, inventory control, production control, minimized lead times and the real-time data information (to facilitate top management and employees on shop floor) are extremely helpful to control these barriers.

The originality of this study is the provision of clarity provided to both academicians and practitioners by citing and utilizing previous research studies which undoubtedly indicates positive impacts of RFID on lean implementation.